Look, I was all set to write up this cookware bundle as a “legal pot sale”. I was going to say how “pot users” should act now, as there’s no telling when the current administration might effect a crackdown on “online pot vendors”. It was going to be hilarious.
But then some joyless dope in our office piped up to say “I think these are all actually pans”, touching off an hour-long debate over the difference between pots and pans, which utterly sapped my enthusiasm for the joke. Another hilarious bit killed by pedantry!
Some on our team claim the difference is mainly one of depth — i.e., pans are shallower. By that criterion, probably three of these vessels are pots (or four if you count the steamer insert, which I wouldn’t), and two are pans.
Others contend pots are differentiated from pans by handle placement. Any piece of cookware with a single, elongated handle is a pan, whereas a pot has two handles opposite each other. This makes a kind of sense. No one outside a mental institution would call Oklahoma’s relatively narrow northwestern projection a “pothandle” and expect to be understood, even though the state looks more like the profile of a pot than a pan by the depth test.
Finally, we have some context-is-everything, empirical-evidence-is-constructed-in-the-mind, objective-reality-is-a-myth postmodernists on staff who say an implement’s pot-ness or pan-ness hinges on how you use it. Pots are for liquid stuff — boiling and simmering and stewing — and pans are for frying. According to this crazy worldview, the same piece of cookware could be either a pot, or a pan, or both. Obviously this is nonsense, because you could also put it on your foot, and it wouldn’t be a shoe; you’d have a pot on your foot. (At best you could say you were “wearing a pot as a shoe.”)
By the time we’d wasted a big chunk of the workday arguing all this out — with no party convincing another, I might add — I was completely done thinking about it, and had no residual energy to make dumb jokes about how this was a “great deal for pot aficianados”. Oh, well. I kind of can’t believe our pointless debate went on as long as it did.
But you know how people get when they’re high.
